Journal #4: On “Near Halloween”

“Near Halloween” confuses the reader – at least it confused me, at first – because Boruch never explicitly explains what is hanging “by the neck” (3) on a “star-eyed gable” (8). It relies on the reader’s power of implication to figure out what the poem is about by using textual clues. Because it is entitled “Near Halloween,” I thought it was referring to a scarecrow with “stuffed jeans / and flannel shirt” and a “pillowcase head” (3-4). There are several details in the poem that make the question of “is it a scarecrow?” worth asking, though. “Like a bad thought, someone else’s / bad thought, it hangs / by the neck” (1-3) makes me think of someone thinking about committing suicide by hanging. The poet also writes that “It could be / anyone up there” (16-17). The thing that really confuses me about this poem is the last two lines: “Not that anything’s eternal / or exactly like any other thing.” Is she saying that life is not eternal, and that the proof is in this dead corpse? Or that this scarecrow is not eternal because it only lives around Halloween?

Line nine – “all misery–ha!–to you and you and damn you!” – could be translated two ways. If the thing hanging is indeed a scarecrow, the “jubilant drunk” (7) may have put it up to unintentionally mock those in misery with its sinister, grinning pillowcase head. If it is a person who committed suicide, then perhaps they are yelling “damn you!” to misery and depression with their act.